Today, the American Library in Paris announced the winner of their 2025 Book Award, which “celebrates outstanding works of literature that draw on France as a timeless source of inspiration.” The winning title, chosen from a shortlist revealed in September, is Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin.

The jury, which was composed of Claire Messud, Ruth Reichl, and last year’s laureate Adam Shatz, had this to say:

Sue Prideaux’s vibrant and rich biography of Gauguin is an extraordinary achievement: rigorously researched; magisterial in its command of the subject; at once an engrossing narrative and a reappraisal of an artist whom, it turns out, we knew far less well than we imagined. To read Prideaux’s biography is to vicariously experience the life of Gauguin, the many worlds he inhabited, from his early childhood in Peru to his last years in Tahiti, and, not least, the adventure of his art. Prideaux portrays Gauguin in all his moral complexity, refusing to judge him, and thus never allowing us to do so either. Most importantly, she powerfully illuminates his painting, and the struggles that brought it into being, in elegant, often strikingly sensuous prose.

The jury also made a “special mention” of Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, “an ingenious and incisive work of intellectual history, written with unusual flair and brio.”

Wild Thing will be hand-bound in a special, custom edition of two: one will be preserved in the Library’s Special Collection, while the other will be presented to Prideaux, who will also receive a cash prize of $5,000.